College of Engineering & CS Wright State University Dayton, Ohio 45435-0001

CEG 333: Introduction to Unix Prabhaker Mateti Emacs: Search and Replace

C-s tells Emacs to start an interactive search. Type a search term at the prompt, and Emacs will move the cursor to the first occurrence. Press C-s again to find additional occurrences.

While at the I-search: prompt, C-s will restart the last search, M-p cycles through previous searches, and M-y yanks (pastes).

To replace text, press M-% (M-S-5). Emacs can also do replacement of regular expressions (C-M-%).

At the prompt, type the string that should be replaced at the prompt, hit enter, type what it will be replaced with, and hit enter again to start the replacement. y replaces the current match, n skips it, and ! replaces all further matches in the buffer. Just like M-x, the up arrow key at the replace prompts cycles through previous entries.

Note: search and replace are case sensitive by default.

After performing a search or replace, C-u C-SPC will jump back to the point in the buffer where it began. This is an example of using prefix arguments, which are explained later.